America's 34-million African-Americans should be outraged by
the campaign of economic blackmail that a handful of profit-driven
personal injury lawyers are waging against the financially beleaguered
Republic of South Africa.

Against the expressed wishes of the revered
Nelson Mandela and President Thabo Mbeki, the lawyers are filing
class-action lawsuits in courts against U.S. corporations who
did business in South Africa during apartheid - unjustly claiming
that their mere presence in the country aided and abetted that
nation's racist government.

In fact, the companies being sued were
signers of the Sullivan Principles on fair labor principles,
which Mandela and Mbeki credit with embarrassing laggard European
and Asian firms to improve their human rights practices.

The fact that the litigation jeopardizes
badly needed foreign investment in South Africa hasn't deterred
the already wealthy American lawyers who stand to walk away with
millions of dollars if they are successful.

That would be a disaster for South Africa,
a nation of 43 million with a 37 percent unemployment rate and
50 percent of the population living under the poverty line. The
situation is made much worse by the country's incredible AIDS
pandemic: 20.1 percent of the adult population have the debilitating
disease and 360,000 men, women and children die from it annually

The American personal injury lawyers
- virtually all of them multi-millionaires - have a strategy
that is downright self-serving, to say the least.

Their first tactic is to make outrageous
charges against the corporations, using the resulting negative
publicity to bully them into signing a lucrative one-sided settlements.

Those businesses with backbone enough
to seek "justice" encounter the lawyers' fallback strategy,
which is to proceed with trials before friendly, hand-picked
judges who foster multi-million dollar jury verdicts.

In either case, poor black South Africans
will get what amounts to peanuts - very small compensation for
participating in a lawsuit that leaves their stagnant economy
with even fewer jobs as foreign companies delay new investment
and expansion plans, and, in some cases, shutter their factory
doors and leave.

Ironically, the lawsuits against more
than 30 U.S. corporations do not contain any specific allegations
that the companies committed human rights violations in South
Africa.

Far from it. All of the firms instituted
non-discriminatory fair employment policies that provided black
workers with good salaries and fringe benefits, safe working
conditions and the right to join labor unions. And all of the
companies, it should be noted, have better than average minority-hiring
records at their facilities in the United States.

The personal injury lawyers are suing
the American companies under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law
enacted in 1789 to prevent pirates from disposing of booty in
U.S. seaports.

The law, which allows foreign plaintiffs
to litigate in U.S. courts, lay dormant for some 200 years, before
the lawyers managed to convince a judge that it might be used
to sue American companies with investments in South Africa

The South African government vigorously
opposes that twisted interpretation. In effect, asking the lawyers
to cease and desist.

Mandela is particularly upset by the
lawyers' suggestion that outsiders - U.S. courts thousands of
miles away - can do a better job at remedying the wrongs of apartheid
than South Africa's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
which considers claims and grants reparations to apartheid victims.

"South Africans are competent to
deal with issues of reconciliation, reparation and transformation
amongst themselves without outside interference, instigation
or instruction," Mandela said recently. "We have dealt
with our political transition in that manner and we are capable
of dealing with other aspects of our transformation in similar
ways."

Penuell Maduna, South Africa's Minister
of Justice, warns that the U.S. lawsuits threaten foreign investment
in his country, and notes that "we talking to the very same
companies named in the lawsuits about investing in post-apartheid
South Africa."

The Bush Administration agrees and has
filed a brief seeking to limit ATCA lawsuits in U.S. courts on
the grounds they pose a direct threat to national security and
foreign policy interests and could hinder America's war against
terrorism.

Federal judges should respect the wishes
of Presidents Mbeki and Bush in this matter and rule such lawsuits
have no standing in U.S. courtrooms.

To do less is to embrace a paternalistic
theory that smacks more than faintly of colonialism and racism.

It's time to end the lawyers' quest for
jackpot justice at the expense of U.S. foreign policy interests
and South Africa's desperate need to revive a decaying economy.

-by John Meredith. John
Meredith is a member of The National Center-sponsored African-American
leadership group Project 21.

Even Socialized Medicine
Harmed by Excessive Lawsuits

Dr. Eamonn Butler of Britain's Adam Smith Institute has a cautionary
tale from across the pond both for those who oppose legal reform
and those who would increase government's role in health care
-- often the same folks.

Says Dr. Butler:

Socialized medicine has betrayed its
original aims. Far from providing free care to all, it can't
even provide them with free dignity any more -- as Britain's
National Health Service shows.

Take Air Marshall Sir Patrick Dunn, the
90-year old World War II hero, who fell recently at home. His
92-year-old wife called the emergency number. But the paramedics
who arrived left him on the floor begging for help, saying that
'regulations' forbade them lifting him.

Why? Because the NHS authorities don't
want to face lawsuits from staff injuring themselves when lifting
heavy patients. Sir Patrick, though, weighs less than 140 pounds.
But under socialism, rules is rules.

Poor Lorraine Wolsenholme, an MS sufferer,
weighs even less. But she's had to sit, eat -- even sleep --
in a wheelchair for the last 15 months because nurses are banned
from lifting her into bed. She reasonably complains that she's
being treated worse than an animal.

Quite right. Next time I'm sick, I'm
not going to a state-run hospital. I'm going to the vetinary.
Vets at least treat their patients as valued individuals, and
treat them with some dignity. That's because their livelihood
depends on it. But when people's livelihood depends on complying
with bureaucratic rule-books, don't expect much in the way of
service - or even animal levels of dignity.

The cause of the medical liability crisis
is a badly broken system of litigation that serves the interest
of specialized trial lawyers, not patients:

* The vast majority of medical liability
claims (up to 70%) do not result in any payments to patients.
Less than 2% of cases result in trial victories for plaintiffs.
But each of these cases costs almost $25,000 on average to defend.

* Within the very small proportion of
jury cases that find for the plaintiff, "mega-verdicts"
with large awards of noneconomic damages have been increasing
in states that do not have reasonable limits on non-economic
damages. For example, there have been over 20 verdicts of $9
million or more in Mississippi since 1995, and individual cases
in Pennsylvania and Mississippi have reached the $100 million
level.

* Yet even patients who are lucky enough
to get awards don't get most of the money. Lawyers' fees account
for 40% or more of the multimillion-dollar payouts. And less
than 30% of all the money that doctors pay in liability insurance
fees goes to patients. And patients must wait five years on average
for these payouts (longer in cases that go to trial).

* This system rewards personal injury
lawyers who adopt a "lottery" strategy: seek out patients
and encourage them to file lots of claims, even though the vast
majority will have no merit and the patient will get nothing;
and then encourage patients to wait it out through years of litigation
for a small chance of a big win. If exaggerated awards are possible,
even if very unlikely, a personal injury lawyer only needs to
win one out of hundreds of cases to make it all worthwhile --
from the standpoint of the lawyer. But the vast majority of patients
get nothing for their troubles, doctors lose billions in insurance
costs and time and may have to leave their practice altogether,
and all patients pay higher prices and get worse care as a result.

-The
President's Framework for Improving the Medical Liability System,
available online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/medicalliability/pg5.html

Original
articles in this edition of Legal Briefs may be reprinted provided
source is credited.